A hotel created and enabled a guest WLAN profile yesterday, but guests never see that SSID. The profile was not added to the policy tag assigned to the guest access points. What is missing?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A WLAN profile in the configuration is a recipe in a drawer. Your access points cook only what their policy tag maps to a policy profile. Until that mapping exists, guests are not ignoring the SSID, because it was never served.
Full Explanation
On a Catalyst 9800 the policy tag is what an access point actually receives for WLANs. Each entry maps a WLAN profile to a policy profile, and only those pairs are pushed to the access points that carry the tag. An enabled WLAN profile that was never added to the guest policy tag is not on those access points, so the SSID is not broadcast and guests cannot see it. The country code is a regulatory setting for radios, not a per-VLAN flag that unlocks an SSID, and a second country code on a VLAN is not how broadcast is controlled. Monitor mode scans and does not serve clients. Putting the guest access points into monitor mode would stop them from advertising any WLAN, which is the reverse of the fix. An RF tag influences radio parameters such as channel and power. Forcing power to zero would make a radio useless, and power is not held at zero until the first association. The SSID has to be in the tag before any guest can associate. Exam caveat: the WLAN also has to be enabled inside that policy-tag mapping. A mapped but disabled WLAN is still absent from the air. Operational check: open the policy tag on the guest access points and confirm this WLAN profile is mapped to the intended policy profile, then check that a test client sees the SSID.